“Her Calumny Has Penetrated Every Drawing Room in Ottawa”: Gossip and Scandal in Canada’s Nationalities Branch, 1939–45

This article investigates the impact of gossip and scandal on the Nationalities Branch, the bureaucracy responsible for Canada’s management of foreign-language groups during the Second World War. To date, scholars have acknowledged the problems plaguing the branch and its personnel, including a dearth of resources and attempted power grabs from other departments. This article turns to the personal life of Tracy Philipps, the branch’s European advisor, to tell this story more comprehensively. I argue that gossip about his relationship with his ex-wife Lubka Kolessa, which was publicized in the pro-communist press by a fellow civil servant, is critical to explaining the branch’s growing ineffectiveness and its eventual restructuring into the Citizenship Division after the war. This bureaucratic transformation profoundly impacted the government’s relationship with the organized Ukrainian Canadian community, for whom Philipps became a conduit for the development of a politics of resentment. This article likewise contributes to methodological discussions about the use of gossip, prejudicial sources, and personal information in historical research. By foregrounding gossip and scandal, it moves beyond a top-down history of the Nationalities Branch to reveal the power struggles, betrayals, and interpersonal conflicts that structured its operations as well as the government’s broader relationship to the Ukrainian Canadian community.